‘Ali Foundation’ to host seminar

published by ikhan on Mon, 06/09/2014 - 07:50

Trinidad Express article.

Port of Spain, Trinidad - The Zaheer Ali Foundation in collaboration with the Trinidad and Tobago Cricket Board (TTCB) will be hosting a high performance leadership seminar on Saturday which is geared towards providing training for potential leaders both on the cricket field and in the community.

Founder of the Foundation, Zaheer Ali, a former West Indies youth captain and Trinidad and Tobago senior cricketer, has been engaged in discussions with the TTCB executive and Youth Development Committee to roll out the programme and strongly believes that it is important to invest in the cohort of quality and competent leaders.

The initiative comes on the heels of Denesh Ramdin’s appointment as captain of the West Indies Test team. T&T’s Dwayne Bravo is the captain of the regional one-day squad, while Marissa Aguilera leads the West Indies women’s team. This season also saw Rayad Emrit take up the captaincy of the T&T teams in the absence of regular skipper Ramdin who was on duty with the regional side.

Ali said 20 potential leaders of the various T&T youth teams—Under-13, Under-15, Under-17, Under-19—and Zonal youth teams, among them prolific youth batsman Kirstan Kallicharan who is in the national Under-17 squad, would be invited to take part in the seminar.

Speaking about the initiative, Ali said: “It is imperative that we adopt measures that will seek to achieve this objective in an attempt to ensure the future success of our regional and national teams but more importantly, to pave the way for succession planning. We must make certain that our leadership capacity is sufficiently developed to meet our future leadership requirement.”

He said the Foundation has tailored a high performance leadership seminar titled “Shaping and Moulding our Future Leaders: A Proactive Approach” which he said was geared towards developing and improving our young cricketers from a leadership perspective. “The proposed seminar would mainly focus on the components and importance of effective leadership and the attributes of a successful leader,” he explained.

Ali, who is has a Bachelor of Laws Degree and is a member T&T Police Service noted that “In light of the challenges we face as a nation, where our youths are concerned, such an approach would not only develop them as leaders in the field of cricket but as individuals who would possess the necessary skills and knowledge to lead in other aspects of life.

“In addition, this approach would focus on the overall development of our cricketers making them not only potential ambassadors of the TTCB but well